Ask HN: How has your programming style changed over time? - <AUTHOR> When did you start programming? What has changed in your programming style and why? <comment><USER2> I write simpler code because it's easier to understand and maintain, for me and coworkers. It took so long to write like one thinks a junior dev would write :-)

Another change is a consequence of being polyglot (mainly Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Elixir now plus some C and PHP.) I can see where language and library designers go out of their way to make things unnecessarily complicated, or where the idiomatic way of a language is stubbornly complex. I try to stay idiomatic because it helps maintenance but I pick simple solutions anytime I can.

Finally, as the other reply states, I got better and more verbose at naming. One good name could be worth 100 words in a comment. It's like placing a big red Stop button in the middle of a dashboard instead of hiding it, small and black, under the desk.

Ah, I write down a lot of things in wikis. Coworkers thank me but they still don't write anything. They're about 10 years younger than me, they'll get there too (to document stuff).

</comment><comment><USER3> To name just a few:

\- In high school (early 2000's), and through most of college I was mostly writing programs in simple text editors and debugging with print statements. Since then, using IDE's and other more featured editors, and eventually chrome devtools, completely changed that.

\- Also in secondary school, my variable names were pretty bad, and even sometimes an intentional joke. Today, I'm pretty verbose in function/var naming.

\- Never used to spend time writing useful comments.

</comment><comment><USER4> In the mid 80s.

The main change, I think, was a vast improvement immediately after reading _Refactoring_ and _Clean Code_.</comment>


"Lixie", an LED Alternative to the Nixie Tube - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.io/project/18633-lixie-an-led-alternative-to-the-nixie-tube <comment><USER2> Hey, I'm going to be shipping these for Connor :)</comment>


Narcissists, Psychopaths, & Manipulators: "Virtuous Victim Signaling" Says Study - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/2020/07/07/narcissists-psychopaths-and-manipulators-are-more-likely-to-engage-in-virtuous-victim-signaling-says-study/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Moral immunity shields the alleged victim from criticism about the means they might use to satisfy their demands. In other words, victim status can morally justify the use of deceit, intimidation, or even violence by alleged victims to achieve their goals. Relatedly, claiming victim status can lead observers to hold a person less blameworthy, excusing transgressions, such as the appropriation of private property or the infliction of pain upon others, that might otherwise bring condemnation or rebuke. Finally, claiming victim status elevates the claimant's psychological standing, defined as a subjective sense of legitimacy or entitlement to speak up."

</comment><comment><USER2> >"The so-called "dark triad" personality traits—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy—lead to characteristics like "self-promotion, emotional callousness, duplicity, and tendency to take advantage of others," the paper explains.

And "treated as a composite, the _Dark Triad_ traits were significant predictors of _virtuous victim_ signaling."

[...]

>"They point out that _virtue signaling_ is defined as "the conspicuous expression of moral values, done primarily with the intent of enhancing one's standing within a social group."

Meanwhile, _victim signaling_ "may be used as a social influence tactic that can motivate recipients of the signal to voluntarily transfer resources to the signaler," they explain. More from the paper's theoretical background section:

An emerging literature on _competitive victimhood_ documents the prevalence of victim signaling by various social groups and provides evidence for its functionality as a resource extraction strategy."

OK, I'm not saying I agree or disagree with any of this.

But, there might be some words and terminology here for my 2020 lexicon, including, but not limited to:

"Competitive Victimhood"

"Dark Triad"

"Moral Immunity"

"Victim Signaling"

"Virtue Signaling"

"Virtuous Victim"

etc.

<comment><USER3> Also "real bullying" through "supposed victimhood."</comment></comment>


McDonald's staff took offence to digital glasses, inventor says - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/07/17/tech-mann-digital-eye-glass-assault.html

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4252955>

_Added in edit after tokenadult made his reply:_

 _I see that this is, as tokenadult says, a professional reporter writing about the incident. It is, perhaps, of some interest that this story should be taken up by the mainstream press, but it does add very little to the original story. The following is new:_

        ... a McDonald's media representatives sent a
        statement by email saying, in part:

            "We take the claims and feedback of our customers
            very seriously. We are in the process of gathering
            information about this situation, and we ask for
            patience until all of the facts are known."

_It would be especially useful if the media harass McDonald's until a proper response is finally given._

 _So that's new, and my bare reference to the original blog post perhaps should have said that. Interestingly, I was prevented from saying that quickly because I was IP banned, and it's only that my modem rebooted and changed my dynamic IP address that I can write this. So I will respect the intent of the IP ban and go "off-line" for a time._

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, Colin, this is the first follow-up by professional journalists to the blog post that launched that busy previous HN thread.</comment></comment>


7 Things Great Leaders Always Do (But Mere Managers Always Fear) - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/7-things-great-leaders-always-do-but-mere-managers-always-fear.html

<comment><USER2> Love the sass error.</comment>


BLOCKS: Serverless compute in the network - <AUTHOR> https://www.pubnub.com/products/blocks/ <comment><AUTHOR> Wow! Pretty cool this has gotten some attention. A bit of background - <USER2> team has had BLOCKS in the works for a long time, and in fact it was part of our founders' initial pitch to investors. We've been actively developing and testing BLOCKS for about a year, and over 800 companies signed up for early access. If you're a developer doing something that is "realtime" \- collaboration, notifications, device signaling, etc - then I'd encourage you to give it a try.</comment>


Dark Web vendors offer up "thousands" of Uber logins starting at $1 each - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/dark-web-vendors-offer-up-thousands-of-uber-logins-starting-at-1-each/#p3

<comment><USER3> Considering they have the plaintext passwords and that Uber can't identify a breach, it's most likely people who re-use the same password and were a victim of another hack (adobe et al.)

</comment><comment><USER4> If this was due to a breach at Uber, it stands to reason there would be millions of accounts for sale, not merely thousands. I'm more inclined to believe this is a result of shared and/or weak passwords.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone say something about this AlphaBay market? I don't think they got any spotlight like Silk Road used to get.

<comment><USER6> Never looked at it myself, think is quite small. But there are plenty of dark net markets that aren't Silk Road.

Since Silk Road 2 was taken down by the feds (sometime last year, around 6-9 months ago I think) the first to look like the biggest was Agora, then Evolution quickly became the most popular due to its nicer functionality (and nicer design), and the fact that Agora often has short periods of downtime due to server load.

Evolution disappeared a few weeks ago, seemingly the owner(s) decided to "exit scam" \- i.e. shut down with no warning and steal all BTC stored in the site by vendors/buyers, thought to be worth $8m (plus whatever profit they made from commission in the previous year).

Since then it has been assumed that Agora will take the top spot, however it has had very bad availability with long periods of the site going down, I believe they've publicly said this is due to the influx of Evolution users and that they are working on improving their site infrastructure. The two biggest down sides to Agora are that they don't offer Multisig support (see below), and that their site design/functionality is pretty nasty. Their upside is that they have the most vendors on there, so the best range of drugs to buy. I believe (though could be wrong, it's been a while since I've been on there) they don't allow vendors to sell fraud/etc. related items, so stuff like Uber accounts wouldn't be allowed on there. Not sure on that, though.

There's plenty of other markets too though, ranging in size and pros/cons - <USER2> basic list can be found at [https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/wiki/superlist](https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/wiki/superlist)

Right now there's a lot of uncertainty around regarding which markets to trust, how long they'll last, etc.

Side note on multisig: what this is is basically a three-way escrow. Traditionally dark net markets offered either "finalize early" (vendor gets your BTC as soon as you order) or "escrow" (website stores the BTC until customer is happy to release to vendor, or until the site admins have to decide who to give them to in the case of a dispute). Multisig means that two out of the three parties (site, vendor, buyer) must agree before the BTC gets released to anyone. So this would prevent markets from doing what Evolution did (stealing all the money in escrow), as if they shut down with no warning then any outstanding deals could still be finalised between buyer and vendor (2 out of 3). However, Evolution was actually one of (if not the) first markets to introduce multisig as an option, and nearly everyone was too lazy to figure out how to use it. Most talk since then is along the lines of "we should all be using multisig all the time", yet I still haven't seen any signs of that happening...

Anyway, this reply is way longer than you actually asked about, I just think the world of dark net markets is pretty interesting :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this at all related to the recent news of Uber storing private keys in the github repo?</comment>


Most iPhone applications gathering dust - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10168694-37.html

<comment><USER2> Once again it's worth clarifying the stats driving this article only reflect FREE apps. I really wish someone would print a more fact-driven, less- sensationalized article on the AppStore. I know I'm expecting WAYYY to much our of popular media, but I can still hope can't I? :)

I get the impression most companies trying to make a business around app's are actually in a "purgatory", experiencing enough success to keep them interested but not enough to write a letter home from a resort in Tahiti. I suspect 80% of the companies in this position will die off or become very small 'part time' gigs in the next 6-12 months, the existing 20% will benefit from a maturing product (a barrier to new competitors)... hopefully they'll see fiscal rewards for their time, energy, and risk as Apple fixes the AppStore economy. Lots of developer churn nonetheless...

I look at the Top 100 sales charts for iTunes religiously, it's saddening to see a lot of the crap that overshadows the premium apps. The 24hour volume- driven charts discourages educated and affluent shoppers who would pay $4.99-9.99 for a quality app, while attracting gum-stand development and crap novelty. And search sucks.

This has been stated time and time again yet Apple seems to not care — not because they aren't doing, but because they aren't responding to dev concerns. I imagine this type of application-churn is fiscally rewarding and so Apple currently lacks any real incentive to do otherwise.

<comment><USER3> I was looking at Skype's developer zone and something similar seems to happen there: like Apple, their documentation is well done and clear and they seem to really make sure all the info is there to build some plug-ins and stuff like that around Skype.

But if you look at the "Extras" section (the equivalent of the App Store), almost all of them have a rating of 3 out of 5 with thousands of votes for only hundreds of downloads and rarely more than 5 comments. It just doesn't make any sense and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to find the good ones.

Apple is doing a little bit better on the ratings side but still, there have been many complaints about how difficult it is to get out of the pack for a developer and nothing seems to be done.

It's too bad to make the whole development easy but not making the last step as polished as the rest.

One thing too is that it's bad for the developers who are trying to have their work recognized but it's also bad for customers who don't really care so much for the one-shot apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not that surprising. Most popular iPhone apps are built (and priced) to be treated like junk food.

<comment><USER5> That's a really great analogy. Additionally, all the press seems to think that everyone who writes an iPhone application will become the next McDonalds.

A serious case of selection bias by the media...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just because I don't use my Wok every day, doesn't mean it's not useful to me.

</comment><comment><USER7> What we need are apps that plug into commonly-used programs. An example of what I'm talking about is Google Talk: it's a chat program, and I use it from time to time, but I never run it. It just happens to be there when I have Gmail open, so if I should need to send an instant message to someone, I can just do it. If I had to remember to fire up a separate app just for that, I probably wouldn't bother.

Or look at Zotero: it's a program for managing bibliographies, for filing away papers and notes when you're doing research online. It also happens to be a Firefox plugin. When I have a research paper open in my browser, I can just click an unobtrusive icon to save the citation for later. The extra burden of opening a separate app just isn't there.

I'm sure there's money to be made from this idea.

</comment><comment><USER8> I know from my personal usage this to be true for most of my application. There are a couple I use repeatedly, (Units) I guess that's the one only one.

If it wasn't for extended bathroom breaks or my kids are using my phone when we go out to eat, my applications wouldn't get used at all. Less than a year ago there weren't any apps and the phone sold just fine and was just as useful.

</comment><comment><USER9> How is this data being collected? (I looked at the "pinch media" website, and it looks like they are some sort of ad network. So I doubt their analytics cover the apps that don't request ads from their servers, making this data very close to useless.)

<comment><USER6> They also provide tracking service completely independent of the ads. <http://www.pinchmedia.com/developers/>

So while it doesn't cover all apps in the app store, it covers more than just apps that use their advertising platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the scary thing is that in the almost-always-network-on world of the iPhone - per-user app tracking (albeit aggregated anonymously) is so easy to integrate that most users don't know it exists (PinchMedia's SDK).</comment>


Antibiotics nearly double risk of developing IBD, doctors warn - <AUTHOR> https://www.studyfinds.org/antibiotics-double-ibd-risk/ <comment><USER3> Makes a lot of sense. We know so little about the trillions of bacteria inside of us, and taking a nuke to them all is going to have consequences. There are probiotics tuned for IBD on the market, and one can only imagine the complexities of the ecological dynamics.

I personally believe that in 100 years there will be a real bacterial awakening in science understanding how much our microbiome affects so much about our health and happiness, and will look at antibiotics as a Neanderthal- like in their oversimplification.

<comment><USER4> Many antibiotics dont actually kill gram negative/positive bacteria, they merely prevent them from reproducing. Now if you want to kill bacteria, look to Russian phages, or swallow some sea water where a 1ml sample will contain billions of phages but its pot luck if any of them are right one's you need for your bacterial infection. One other little know fact about antibiotics, is the penicillin based one's get metabolised in the liver into penicillamine which is used to reduce copper levels in the body and ironically copper also helps to kill bacteria. [https://www.nature.com/articles/151107a0](https://www.nature.com/articles/151107a0) Considering what Penicillamine does to the body and how it affects Vit B6, you can see why you get pain in different parts of the body when you take too much Vit B6, however its also a good way to find out where bacterial levels are high in the body, dental fillings can be a common area. Creatine gets broken down into creatinine and happens to be one of the few things that can kill both gram negative and gram positive bacteria, of course you need to consume a lot of it though, but havent worked out why we get told to not consume creatine for more than a few weeks though. Anyone know?

<comment><USER5> One downside to phages is that they replicate. Once you stop taking antibiotics, there is no risk that the treatment will replicate and potentially mutate inside of you. Otherwise, I agree.

With regards to creatinine, I'm sure you'd want to generally suppress your bacterial load if you don't have symptoms or an active infection. That could leave the door open for a worst bacteria or fungus to come along and fill the niche.

<comment><USER4> My understanding based on an expert here in the UK is that Phages only replicate as long as there is the bacteria around that they were bred to infect and replicate in. As soon as the bacteria levels drop, phages die as there is essentially no food for them to consume. Considering the timescales to develop phages for a strain of bacteria (2 weeks), the ideal treatment is antibiotics, then phages to complete the job, because even Flemming stated when he discovered Penicillin, you need to keep taking these antibiotics until the infection is gone, but today many doctors just prescribe a course for 7-14days, and then you have to go back to get another course if they will prescribe another course, at least on the NHS its like that, and thats when you can get an appointment in my experience. Also bacteria can go into dormancy developing biofilms in different parts of the body and creatinine wont work then. As the immune system attacks the food we eat bar some exceptions like starch as the only sugar not attacked, when we do a water only fast the number of immune cells drop as the numbers are not needed to attack the food. So the lower number of immune cells concentrate on attacking pathogens and faulty cells. Considering Lent used to be 40days of water only fasting, and there was no modern medicine back then, it seems observation and trial and error over thousands of years highlighted a suitable way to keep religious followers healthy, a necessary requirement for religions back then. Today science can explain why water only fasting works for so many illnesses. It seems Herbet Shelton was good at observing considering what we know about Vit D [https://web.archive.org/web/20110222200902/http://www.soilan...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110222200902/http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020127shelton.III/020127.toc.htm)

However, one of the reasons why his Hygienist methods ie water only fasting were not popular is because some undiagnosed health conditions caused sudden deaths when on a water only fast, so this is why water only fasting is not popular in the medical industry, but Socrates called water only fasting the physician from within, so even the ancient Greeks had made their own observations of what worked way back then with their limited toolset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Read _Never Home Alone_, ch 10 "Look What the Cat Dragged in ([https://magazine.scienceconnected.org/2020/05/book-review- ne...](https://magazine.scienceconnected.org/2020/05/book-review-never-home- alone/)) to learn about Toxoplasmosis gondii to blow your mind.

The whole book is excellent and there is supporting evidence therein about our personal biota impacting our health, especially around allergies.

</comment><comment><USER7> Purely an anecdote: I wrote in a related thread about 5 years ago how I had an allergic reaction and my guts became a mess after taking antibiotics for the first time in my life (around age 23) [[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10555891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10555891)]. I managed to get better by changing my diet. In 2017 I had another course of antibiotics, got very ill again and was hospitalized, diagnosed with IBD (UC), and spent nearly 13 weeks in hospital. Only thing that keeps me in remission now is Azathioprine. Had to cut back on the fibre too, now my diet is mainly meat. I also became lactose intolerant, where I'd been drinking milk all my life up to 2017 (age 30).

<comment><USER8> This is a shot in the dark, but I had taken antibiotics to treat an infection twice last fall, then suddenly this summer have been having unexplainable (so far) stomach issues. Given the somewhat longer period after taking the antibiotics, is the length of time somewhat similar to yours?

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it could be similar. (Can't remember clearly first time as it was 10 years ago now).

Second time my stomach complaint got really bad, my doc assumed it was gastroenteritis and prescribed me more antibiotics. They were useless, and he figured it might be IBD a few weeks later and prescribed me some steroids (Prednisolone). The dose of steroids prescribed was useless as I already had severe symptoms by then, so I ended up hospitalized and pumped with a high dose of Hydrocortisone. If it were a few days later I probably would've been dead.

For a few months before my guts were bad, I was having pains in my chest (around the bottom of the ribcage). The doctor thought it was gallstones, but a UV scan came back negative. The pains in the lower part of the colon came afterwards, along with the diarrhoea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I cannot wait until we discover a basic understand of the human microbiome. As a practice, gastroenterology is very good at diagnosing and dealing with cancer and very bad at dealing with anything else. IBS/IBD is basically a blanket diagnosis handed out when your doctor has no idea what's wrong with you.

<comment><USER10> IBD is very different from IBS. IBD is an autoimmune disease with a pathologic diagnosis (ie requires a biopsy and microscopic evaluation for diagnosis). It's treated as almost autoimmune diseases are.

IBS is a syndrome (the S in the name) which usually implies a constellation of findings, but not a specific disease process. From the name you can know that the disease process hasn't been clearly elucidated.

<comment><USER11> IBD is a catch-all for several different diseases, which are all poorly understood. There is still a debate over whether or not their cause is physical or psychological. There's a big gap between observing inflammation or related markers and actually understanding the disease. Even within the same subdiagnosis, people respond vastly differently to treatments, which more or less can all be described as intentionally crippling the immune system to stop inflammation. It's not uncommon for people with IBD to have tried a roulette of medications with questionable efficacy and dangerous side effects. If you talk to three different doctors you will get three different treatments and/or lifestyle change recommendations. I know several people who have quit all medications after this experience and turned to and alternative/holistic approach.

IBD shares this lack of understanding and heavy handed approach with many other autoimmune diseases. Being in this category is not a good thing. It's not unfair to lump IBD/IBS together; people who have these conditions share a lot of the same issues and struggles.

<comment><USER12> 3 years ago I got diagnosed with IBS after I landed in the hospital with a stabbing pain just right next to my belly button (sometimes I still feel it lightly) what they first thought was caused by kidney stones. Nothing turned up on the xrays or echoes. Since then things have only gotten worse as if it has spread upwards first causing constipation, then silent reflux (causing a constant burning sensation in my throat, mouth and nose), pain in my neck, foggy brain (which started recently) and so on. The GP, which in my country decides if I have to be forwarded to a specialist to relieve the medical system, keeps attributing everything to my IBS. Once I got the diagnosis IBS it is as if they stopped taking me seriously and act as if I am just being a hypochondriac so I decided to just let it be.

<comment><USER13> [IANAD] what you describe might as well be SIBO (as far as i understand in my limited non-professional understanding the bacterial overgrowth can cause the IBS symptoms too though fortunately i was spared that). It took some years in my case to stumble upon definitive test - the lactose based breath test - <USER2> all these years doctors dismissing it as "just take the antacid" (which is actually no-no for SIBO), and even with the definitive diagnosis confirmed by the test it is still a struggle to get a right doctor to correctly treat it.

<comment><USER12> Yes, they gave me different antacids and so far nothing has helped. I wish it was just like a regular acid reflux, but best way to describe it is as if there is a cloud of aerosolized acid being released from my esophagus 24/7 that is spreading and causing an non-stop burning sensation everywhere it gets inside my throat, mouth, nose, eyes and I think it is damaging my larynx. None of the usual advice seems to help. Days that I am feeling better I can eat an entire chocolatebar, mint tea, lay / sleep flat, everything I should not do and it does not get worse. Something I noticed though is that it disappears everytime I go on vacation and actually eat worse than usual (McDonald's etc.)

Never had any test done for SIBO I think. They did a stool test, sigmoidoscopy and found nothing. That is how I ended up being diagnosed with IBS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I once had to take antibiotics like crazy for a long time because I had some pain in the ass strep that wouldn't go away. It was quite the experience.

Afterwards, my breath was bizarre smelling, I had these horrible sulphuric burps for months, and I couldn't digest ANYTHING properly. It was misery. I had such painful gas from indigestion so frequently that eating totally lost its appeal.

This stacks up right in my experience. I stay far from antibiotics as a rule, but if you need them, you need them. I hope I never need them again.

<comment><USER15> Sounds familiar to me. Had two big antibiotic treatments after dental surgeries last year. This did not feel right. How did you get rid of the problems? Change in diet?

<comment><USER14> This is insanely anecdotal and doesn't hold any scientific integrity, but:

I ate a lot of raw, sometimes fermented, vegetables and fruit. Generally high in fibre. I avoided foods I'd need to wash much because I was trying to fill my system with a diversity of bacteria. A bit of dirt was part of the goal. I ate stuff out of my garden, from a little local organic farm, foraged foods like berries and mushrooms, etc.

No idea if that's what helped, but I'm totally fine now. Whatever I did before wasn't working, or wasn't working quickly. Once I went to my mostly plant- based "dirty" diet, so to speak, the improvement was rapid. But it didn't happen in isolation, either. I also reduced my intake of animal proteins mostly, which would probably be a significant factor in digestion. Eggs would reduce the presence of sulphuric gases especially.

I'm not a believer in pro-biotics (they don't seem to support diversity, which seems essential), but I believe people should eat a lot of diverse bacteria in their foods. Things like wild mushrooms, plants grown in your yard that aren't extensively washed and peeled. Don't cook everything to death. Let some little critters into your system and let them do their thing. Assuming you don't get the particularly bad ones (usually easy to avoid if you know how the food is grown), I can't think of easier ways to introduce the diversity required to properly populate your GI tract.

Again though, I have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm just some guy who eats dirty carrots in his yard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some observations:

\- I'm surprised they could find controls who had never received antibiotics. I assume this over some time period and not lifetime

\- For each exposure to antibiotics, there was a stepwise increase in risk from 1.11 to 1.38 to 1.55

\- When they matched them to siblings, the risk went down (1.35 versus 1.88) suggesting a genetic component to the overall risk

<comment><USER17> My guess is the control group wasn't made of people with no history of antibiotics. They just used the model to predict the risk difference between zero and one time of taking antibiotics. The control was people from the general population, and the "test" was people who had already developed IBD.

Though there are people, like me, who are allergic to many common antibiotics. Between some bad reactions in childhood and an emergency three years ago (over two decades), I never had antibiotics.

<comment><USER16> Taking another look, I think they are measuring antibiotic dispensations _within the time period_. Which makes a ton more sense because I'm imaging the number of people who have never been exposed to an antibiotic over their entire lifetime is pretty small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How solid is the evidence that accutane causes IBD? Because most people who took accutane would have first taken antibiotics, which is a more common treatment for acne.

It's strange that these two drugs, with two different mechanisms of action, would both increase risk of IBD.

I took both and I have IBD. Stay away from this stuff unless you really need it.

<comment><USER19> I can raise your anecdata to two: I took lots of antibiotics as a kid for ear infections, then lots more as a prelude to acutane, and 15 years later I have proctitis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Antibiotics cured my IBD. Had problems for years. A brief course of amoxicillin and some other, now forgotten, antibiotic (taken for unrelated reasons,) ended it almost immediately. It was amazing.

What wasn't so good was catching C. diff. soon after, almost certainly because of the aforementioned antibiotics.

Another treatment of yet another antibiotic dealt with that.

Net result; no IBD.

<comment><USER21> Related: Antibiotics cured, for about a year, my severe gluten and corn intolerance. Then the gluten intolerance ame back. Ive gone through a few rounds of eliminating the gluten issues in this fashion, but the symptoms always return 10-16 months later.

<comment><USER22> You may have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth [1].

If you can't digest certain types of food, the bacteria which feed on this food grow out of proportion to their place in the microbiome. You'd often notice symptoms an hour or more after eating the food in question, which would give time for the food to hit the small intestine almost entirely undigested.

Taking antibiotics would kill off the overgrowth, but it would grow back over time unless you cut out the food or took supplementary digestive enzymes along with the food.

[1]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_intestinal_bacterial_o...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_intestinal_bacterial_overgrowth)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Honestly I thought that was pretty well known already. I knew a girl in college about 20 years ago who had been on massive amounts of anti-biotics, and it ruined her stomach & digestive system in some way. At the time she was having to slowly build up "good" bacterial through some type of specialty yogurts (might just have been probiotics, which were not as prevalent then). It was a multi-year process though, and she couldn't eat a lot of types of food in the meantime.

<comment><USER24> Why didn't she just get a fecal transplant?

<comment><USER25> Because you can't. They're reserved for c-diff infections and there isn't much risk data on use cases outside of that such that regular providers won't give it the OK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Let me explain my case here. 2 months back I was having stomach pain around the abdomen, it comes and goes, especially its a bit high after taking food. Consulted doctor, and he gave medicines assuming its gastritis, without antibiotics. Lipid profile was normal, SGPT was a bit higher (55 U/L)A Urea Breath test showed that I am positive for H-Pylori.

A USG abdomen showed a gaseous proximal colon along with mild wall thickening of sigmoid and adjacent descending segment around left lilac fossa (Radiologist assumed either spastic colon/ sequela of colitis). The Doc started treatment with antibiotics Amoxidin(Amoxicillin) + Flagyl(Metronidazole) for 14 days along with Gordex and Gaviscon for gastritis. After 14 days, the pain has drastically reduced, but I started having constipation, minor fissure. Consulted doc again, and he gave Flagyl(Metronidazole) for 7 days along with lactulose. Stomach pain actually went away when I started taking lactulose also H-Pylori was not detected on the next test(using H-Pylori antigen stool test).

When I stopped the medicines again, the constipation and occasional stomach pain came back. I started taking lactulose 2 times a day after the 14 + 7 days antibiotic course, everything was smooth, but when I stopped lactulose, stomach pain came back. I have then started reading about the symptoms and somewhere I read about gut flora and how antibiotics damages gut flora, on reading much I started asking my doc about probiotics.

He recommended a probiotic which said Colon support containing 20 billion CFU. The mix of probiotics was Bifidobacteria blend(18 billion CFU) (Bifidobacteria lactis, Bifidobacteria infantis, Bifidobacteria longum, Bifidobacteria breve, Bifidobacteria bifidum)) along with Lactobacillus Blend(1.5 Billion CFU) (Lactobacillus rhamnosus, Lactobacillus plantarum, Lactobacillus casei, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, Lactobacillus helverticus) and Stephalococus Thermophilus (500 million CFU). Taking a probiotic capsule for 6 days has improved a lot, and I have a smooth stomach motion, and doesn't have the stomach pain or constipation anymore.

What I knew from Doc is, if we eat prebiotic (Food with good fiber), it is decomposed by good bacteria and they reproduce good. On the other hand, if you take high sugar, it usually helps the bad bacteria growth like H-Pylori or E Coli. I was taking this advice and taking a lot of salads in these days.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ayurvedic practitioners always said stay away from western medicine, chemicals the rip out your gut and change your doshas.

Back in the day these good bacteria were found in milk, but now its homogenised and pastuerised they are killed off. THe reason we need to pastuerise the milk is to kill TB, but TB became more prominent after the industrial revolution.

Our demand for industralisation has created the mess we are in now.

</comment><comment><USER28> To help make a "Map" of our gut bacteria, think about "benchmarking" your new Ryzen System with that ;)

[https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/mip1/overview.do](https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/mip1/overview.do)

</comment><comment><USER29> I got lactose intolerant for a few months after some antibotics. It went away again after a while.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wouldn't the application method be a large influence here as well? I imagine that adverse effects from oral application should be more pronounced in the stomach and bowels than with IV use.

</comment><comment><USER24> The next thing to test: Does a fecal transplant after taking antibiotics eliminate the increased risk of developing IBD?

</comment><comment><USER31> I believe it</comment>


Stackless Python and Eve Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=925

<comment><USER2> Large fleet fights can't be effectively handled in any known way. Synchronizing 1k people for real-time battles leads to several minutes lag for any action (on a good day). On a bad day, the local 'node' will just crash. The total number of updates is something like O(n^2) for n active clients.

CCP have done pretty amazing things for the constraints they were under: real time battles, one shard universe.

<comment><USER3> erlang based server (pikko server) is trying for 1k people realtime FPS trial...

[http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/07/pikkotekks-1000-p...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/07/pikkotekks-1000-player- fps/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone considering learning software engineering lessons from CCP should play EVE Online for a while. I personally prefer my lessons coming from people consistently delivering a working product, and not so known for breaking random stuff that people actually have fun predicting what seemingly untouched stuff will get changed by a patch (e.g. [http://www.failheap- challenge.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=23...](http://www.failheap- challenge.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2348) )

</comment><comment><USER5> They're just being silly. Twisted has been using non-blocking IO since forever. One can easily use async IO in stackless as well.</comment>


KRACK, the WPA2 exploit that kills Wi-Fi security, and what you need to know - <AUTHOR> https://m.imore.com/krack <comment><USER2> If you always assume you are being man-in-the-middled, then you were already prepared for this. As long as your traffic is TLS, you are safe.</comment>


Motive.c: The Soul of the Sims (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/Sims/ <comment><USER3> I wanted to get a feel for the logic so I made a quick carbon copy in JavaScript with a simple UI to play with:

[https://codepen.io/blixt/pen/ayyjpZ](https://codepen.io/blixt/pen/ayyjpZ)

<comment><USER4> I noticed this (the original code, and your implementation) seems to only describe the "state of feelings" for a simulant and how they generally only get worse over time. I'm now keen to see the code that then provides direction and action for the sim based on this state; e.g. "I'm feeling hungry, I should eat, what should I eat?" and the process that determines what it should eat - and how to go about it. I know The Sims employed more than just A*-towards- nearest-unoccupied-food-source, but what makes a Sim choose hamburgers from the outdoor grill over making dinner in the kitchen?

<comment><USER5> This demo (starting at 13:06) shows how the SimAntics visual programming language works, and how objects publish advertisements for their available actions (which show up on the pie menus that the user can select, or which the characters can autonomously choose to perform).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs&t=13m6s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs&t=13m6s)

Advertisements appeal to characters based on their current motivations (feelings, hunger, etc), their distance from the object, their relationship with the object (so you prefer to sleep in your own bed), and SimAntics scoring functions that can perform arbitrary calculations.

Then it shows how all that works together in the "Food Chain", a complex Rube Goldberg device comprised of many different objects, that compels characters to perform the many sequential steps required to prepare and eat food (when then compels them to poop, which makes them need a shower, which makes them tired, and so on).

The main loop of the "autonomy" algorithm that decides what to do next (if you don't tell them what to do) searches for the top several advertisements with the highest score, and then chooses randomly between them. If they always chose the top scoring best thing to do, then their lives would be too mechanically optimized, lacking in whimsey and spontaneity, and anything the user told them to do would deviate from the optimal path, making their lives less efficient, more miserable.

So for better game play and happier users, we randomly dumbed them down a bit so they needed the user's guidance to have a better life (but we didn't make them so dumb that users couldn't fuck up their lives even more, either).

[http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=SimAntics](http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=SimAntics)

<comment><USER4> > If they always chose the top scoring best thing to do, then their lives > would be too mechanically optimized, lacking in whimsey and spontaneity, and > anything the user told them to do would deviate from the optimal path, > making their lives less efficient, more miserable.

Couldn't they add a "monotony" factor to the SimMotive struct that increases as their daily life becomes too uniform, which in-turn leads to greater overall unhappiness if it's too monotonous, or greater overall stress if their days become entirely unpredictable?

<comment><USER6> That would cost more CPU for the same result.

<comment><USER5> The trick of optimizing games is to off-load as much as the simulation from the computer into the user's brain, which is MUCH more powerful and creative. Implication is more efficient (and richer) than simulation.

During development, when we first added Astrological signs to the characters, there was a discussion about whether we should invent our own original "Sim Zodiac" signs, or use the traditional ones, which have a lot of baggage and history (which some of the designers thought might be a problem).

Will Wright argued that we actually wanted to leverage the baggage and history of the traditional Astrological signs of the Zodiac, so we should just use those and not invent our own.

The way it works is that Will came up with twelve archetypal vectors of personality traits corresponding to each of the twelve Astrological signs, so when you set their personality traits, it looks up the sign with the nearest euclidian distance to the character's personality, and displays that as their sign. But there was absolutely no actual effect on their behavior.

That decision paid off almost instantly and measurably in testing, after we implemented the user interface for showing the Astrological sign in the character creation screen, without writing any code to make their sign affect their behavior: The testers immediately started reporting bugs that their character's sign had too much of an effect on their personality, and claimed that the non-existent effect of astrological signs on behavior needed to be tuned down. But that effect was totally coming from their imagination!

They should call them Astrillogical Signs!

<comment><USER5> The create-a-sim user interface hid the corresponding astrological sign for the initial all-zero personality you first see before you've spent any points, because that would be insulting to 1/12th of the players (implying [your sign] has zero personality)!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffzt12tEGpY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffzt12tEGpY)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's some more Sims stuff:

[http://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims](http://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims)

[http://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments](http://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments)

</comment><comment><USER7> Something about this program reminds me of the text-mode BASIC games that used to be published in books and magazines in the 1980s.

I remember typing the programs and simultaneously trying to imagine how the simple logic I was entering might build up to something awesome that could be lurking there, just out of my sight between the numbered lines. Most of the time it was a disappointment, but a few of those games did manage to elevate themselves to some kind of unexpected, exciting life that I couldn't have known from just reading the program.

(Of course my standard for excitement was very low.)

<comment><USER8> You have a point. In a certain light, The Sims is a more complex version of Conway's Game of Life, with its simple life-or-death rules for the cells in the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had a revelation while playing the Sims, and this code lays it bare. I found I was spending more time managing these values for my Sim than I was for myself. I have not enjoyed most single player games since.

<comment><USER10> Realizing that _Sims_ games are really meta-games about life is how you actually win any _Sims_ game. The only winning move is not to play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Love how simple it is. A good lesson for anyone trying to kaie a gake. Make the core simple and that will allow complex interactions hetween them.

<comment><USER12> > _kaie a gake_

What does that mean?

<comment><USER13> I assumed "make a game" as typed on a mobile device without autocorrect.

<comment><USER14> m->k and k->i looks like the right hand on the keyboard was misaligned one row too high.

<comment><USER15> Wouldnt that be "jaie a gaje"? The k and m are offset in different directions. This looks like the kind of havoc a mobile keyboard would wreak.

<comment><USER14> Nah. Depends if you're going slightly "north-east" or slightly "north-west". Also probably depends on your locale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I always thought sims borrowed the idea from Little Computer People (~1985) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Computer_People](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Computer_People)

</comment><comment><USER17> looks like someone copied the code over here: [https://github.com/AlexanderPatrick/MPhil/blob/7592cd0dfe7c4...](https://github.com/AlexanderPatrick/MPhil/blob/7592cd0dfe7c495c94a3037504e390598dcdfb76/Assets/Scripts/Sims/Sim.cs)

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there an advantage to storing this as an array, indexed by enum, rather than a strict of 16 floats?

I can't think of a reason. Having to index by enum seems like it could be error prone.

Also, in the init(), instead of looping over all indexes of the array and setting 0, couldn't a memset be used?

<comment><USER19> It enables the coder to engage in some late binding without engaging in a lot of casts or more elaborate metaprogramming: the enum index used for assignment is itself an assignable value and therefore can be passed around and manipulated if the algorithm needs it. It's a very intentional tradeoff of structure and long-term clarity for a faster turnaround to make design changes.

I haven't even checked to see if the final program uses it. It's the kind of thing, though, that you might go in thinking, "maybe I will need that", and it doesn't add too much overhead to your prototype.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a bug in the line computing Motive[mHappyWeek]? It seems like it should have Motive[mHappyDay] instead of Motive[mHappyNow] on the right hand side.

</comment><comment><USER21> What would this look like if it were using behavior trees, hierarchical fsm, or whatever the prevailing pattern is used today?

<comment><USER5> That code is just a prototype, the seed around which the rest of the game nucleated. There is a big thick layer of behavior trees, hierarchal state machines and lots of whatever layered on top, including a visual behavior tree programming language called "SimAntics" and an editing tool called "Edith", which is described and demonstrated here (starting at 11:20):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs)

Here's another demo of some tools for making and managing user created content for The Sims, and SimSlices's amazing version of SimCity embedded in The Sims!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8)

<comment><USER5> To clarify: SimAntics, the behavior tree visual programming language actually existed before Will wrote the "Soul of the Sims".

SimAntics was used in SimCopter for controlling the little Sims with simpler souls who walked around the city, for dispatching the police, firemen and medics who picked up injured Sims and brought them back to the helicopter, as well for implementing the notorious gay easter-egg with a bug that caused hundreds of shirtless "himbos" in fluorescent fog-piercing speedos (using the same special render as runway lights) to swarm all over the city hugging and kissing on Friday the 13th!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4mh7Pc5MSI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4mh7Pc5MSI)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozL3LtSsYd8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozL3LtSsYd8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The simplicity makes it beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER23> Could be one of the few lines of source code survived, as an small office fire in 2001 caused troubles.

Basically the predecessor of The Sims was SimTown (also by Maxis). It was a smaller scale SimCity meets The Sims gameplay. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTown)

Later SimsVille was meant to evolve the gameplay in the same direction again, though it go canceled (source code lost due office fire). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimsVille](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimsVille)

Almost all the [Maxis] games development data was lost during a small office server room fire [in 2001], that resulted in most of the game being developed again from scratch, according to this source: [https://www.unseen64.net/tag/maxis/](https://www.unseen64.net/tag/maxis/)

<comment><USER23> Initial 1996 design document of The Sims, when it was still called "Happy- Friends-Home" from the same website: [http://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/HappyFrien...](http://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/HappyFriendsHome-2-10-96.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment> brian-armstrong The formatting in this code is atrocious. It's so much harder to find bugs when the code itself is so disorganized

<comment><USER3> This code was not made for bug fixing though, it's just a prototype - <USER2> expression of an idea. The accompanying text even says as much - of course the final game couldn't possibly have a single sim's mood in a global variable.</comment></comment>


Make Money on Android - eBook Updated - <AUTHOR> http://www.kreci.net/android/make-money-on-android-ebook-updated/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just if you would be interested =) Comments welcome!</comment>


Ask HN: What CMS to use for a website that is both user friendly and fast? - <AUTHOR> Trying to escape WordPress with it's myriads of plugins that often too soon turns into a clunky monster. Not mentioning painful user experience when editing website. Is there something you could point me to that has a  designing experience of e.g. wix, but still manages to generate a website that is reasonable fast to use even on mobile devices? (bad experience with wix) One would love to avoid coding as much as possible, but still needs to have freedom of doing so when needed. <comment><USER2> Imho nothing wrong with WP. Fast and with Gutenberg very easy to use cms. Almost all CMS systems face the same challenge: How to make it easy for non IT peps to update it? MS word is already far too complex for most non it people. To avoid tha plugin he'll make a principle choice: feature rich So batteries included or just a bare minimum functionality...

</comment><comment><USER3> I like Drupal</comment>


Cuban Coders Looking to Energize a Nascent Startup Scene - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-norvell/grand-ambitions-young-cub_b_7225436.html?rel=hn

<comment><USER2> This is so cool, i know first hand Cuba has a lot to offer on IT and innovation, I'm in! Do you guys have a mailing list or some other channel? I would like to get notified when new stuff happens.

<comment><USER3> Hi there,

we have a small site explaining what this is all about: [http://meetup.merchise.com/](http://meetup.merchise.com/)

and twitter here: [https://twitter.com/MerchiseMeetup](https://twitter.com/MerchiseMeetup)

<comment><USER2> ah, awesome, following!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are cuban coders? I thought the internet was nearly illegal down there. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba)

<comment><USER3> >There are cuban coders?

There are, a lot of them.

>I thought the internet was nearly illegal down there.

There's internet, expensive though ($4.50/h)

...and, were programmers who created the internet, not the other way around

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm in SF but have Cuban roots. If anyone is interested in chatting drop me a line.

<comment><USER6> Same here. I live in the Bay area but come from Miami from a Cuban family. I'm interested.

<comment><USER3> drop us a line anytime info-at-merchise-dot-com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now there is one more reason to visit Cuba other than to enjoy the beautiful beaches and the delicious rum. I'd love to attend one of the meetups and see if there is any way I can help next time I'm there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rum and warm weather... uhmm... arguable. Way better some mojitos and a bit of chat ;-) Looking forward to meet you next time you come. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm Rodney, co-organizer of Merchise Startup Circle. We intent to help all those who are involved in the Cuban startup scene in any way. The goal is to create a regular meetup for anyone interested in startups, tech and entrepreneurship. Glad to answer any questions

<comment><USER8> There are tons of people that will be glad to collaborate and participate in such meetups here in Cuba. How do you plan to help with those who are involved ? btw, i write you guys at the contact form two days ago.

<comment><USER3> Hi Javier,

> There are tons of people that will be glad to collaborate and participate in > such meetups here in Cuba.

Sure... we know there're tons of people interested. That's exactly the main reason to organize an event like this...

Any kind of collaboration is really appreciated. Drop us a line whenever you want...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hiya! Looking forward to meet you guys and remember those times at UCLV.... Best wishes!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi mate, thanks a lot... Any chance in joining us as a speaker in the near future?

<comment><USER9> That would be great! Returning as speaker to where I left as attendee ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hi guys, glad to see you around. I will be arriving late July, see you there :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hector, we are expecting to hold monthly meetups... See you in July. Let us know before your flight.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm Alex Medina, co-organizing the event with Rodney and Med... AmA</comment>


Explained: Real-time heatmap example - <AUTHOR> http://letmein.at/js/real-time-heatmap-explained/ <comment><USER2> Hilarious...I wrote almost the _exact_ same thing as a GazeHawk visualization about a week ago.

Interesting how he uses the same canvas element to track opacity and display the colorization. You can split out the opacity into its own (hidden) canvas so that the opacity is only bound to the color mapping, not the actual display.

</comment><comment><USER3> The demo doesn't seem to account for a stopped mouse. If you move the mouse slowly in one area, it gets really hot, but if you put your mouse in one spot and don't move, it doesn't get recorded at all. This seems like a big hole.

<comment><USER4> I'd assume that this is because a mouse at rest is one that's probably unattended...

<comment><USER3> I disagree. When I'm reading or figuring out a user interface, I move my mouse with my eye.

Perhaps this is why mouse-based tracking isn't very useful for user testing. It makes a fun demo, though.</comment></comment></comment>


China's Central Bank Has Begun Cautiously Testing a Digital Currency - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608088/chinas-central-bank-has-begun-cautiously-testing-a-digital-currency/ <comment><USER2> > A digital fiat currency—one backed by the central bank and with the same > legal status as a banknote—would lower the cost of financial transactions, > thereby helping to make financial services more widely available. This could > be especially significant in China, where millions of people still lack > access to conventional banks. A digital currency should also be cheaper to > operate, and ought to reduce fraud and counterfeiting.

I don't understand the article's point. Everyone including Chinese banks already uses digital fiat currency. My bank account is full of digital fiat currency going under the name "US dollars". They have exactly the same legal status as banknotes -- in fact, they are so similar that they are considered to be exactly the same thing.</comment>


Introducing Full Emoji Support in NGINX and NGINX Plus Configuration - <AUTHOR> https://www.nginx.com/blog/emoji-nginx-plus-configuration/ <comment><USER2> The emoji craze has had the nice side-effect of forcing a lot of projects to make sure their stuff supports Unicode properly, because now it's something that even English-speaking software users can appreciate. It's a good thing.

<comment><USER3> I never thought about it that way. You are right indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this an April Fools thing or not? I legitimately can't tell and it's making me hate this day even more.

<comment><USER5> Sort of. The announcement is obviously silly, and April-Fools-y, but the changes in nginx aren't--what it's really about is Unicode in general, not emojis specifically.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are there any changes? ;)

<comment><USER6> There are no changes. We've always had unicode support. We had some fun and created several silly configs :)

(I work @ NGINX.)

<comment><USER7> Aww man you need to make these _actually_ work! Would nginx accept a pull request? :D

<comment><USER6> Well, they do! Pull requests welcome, too :) [https://github.com/nginxinc/website-resources- conf/blob/mast...](https://github.com/nginxinc/website-resources- conf/blob/master/emoji.conf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> More and more programs supports unicode now. Why stop at Emoji? APL is going to take back the world finally. Anybody still writing a multi-letter identifier in your code? So 80's...

</comment><comment><USER9> A lot of our internal FarmLogs health check endpoints return the tractor emoji when things are kosher.

<comment><USER10> That is really cute! Do you have anything for when things are not so kosher? Perhaps a pile of poo or a flame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As an aside, in HTML, CSS classes have had the ability to be unicode for a long time.

See an example here: [http://9ol.es/unicode-demo.html](http://9ol.es/unicode- demo.html) ... view the source

</comment><comment><USER12> Wait, is NGINX Plus a real thing or is that part of the joke too?

<comment><USER13> It's real. It's their commercial offering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What a time to be alive

</comment><comment><USER15> This doesn't seem useful at all. _blinkyface_

</comment><comment><USER16> Lol I'm just imagining trying to edit these configs in vim on a vt220 and crying.

<comment><USER17> Vim in a current terminal does indeed support entering unicode. I can even type it by value, see :help utf-8-typing

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> April Fool's?

<comment><USER19> A real announcement (unicode support) in an April Fool's package (doing the announcement only mentioning emoji).

LukeShu nailed it with their reply. :)

<comment><USER6> There's no real announcement. Check the date :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hahaha !

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice , been wanting this</comment>


How to stream the 2018 Super Bowl - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-stream-the-2018-super-bowl/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'll bite. Why is this flagged?</comment>


How a Doctor beat Wall Street - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/04/wall-street-excerpt-201004?printable=true&currentPage=1 <comment><USER2> A lot of people are suggesting that it was immoral of Burry to profit from his insight instead of warning people of the impending calamity, yet what message speaks more forcefully? Saying you think the market is going to implode, vs. paying millions of dollars to insure specifically against that happening?

No one would have listened to his warning, and indeed his investors didn't like hearing it. Burry is not the bad guy in this epic catastrophe.

<comment><USER3> Instead of profiting off people suffering from bad investments in housing, Burry should have stuck with his career in neurology and profited off people suffering from brain cancer.

<comment><USER2> In the article he described in several ways how he had no real interest in medicine, just drifting into it because it seemed easy to study, and was physically repelled by the sight of people being operated on. This is not the kind of person you want operating on you.

<comment><USER3> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another superb article from vanity fair. There was another one a week or so ago about a former sniper in Afghanistan.

Reading this reminded me of when I read about Jeff Greene about a year ago - another guy who made a mint from the housing/mortgage bubble collapse. See: <http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/1006/266.html>

I love these types of stories - an 'outcast' who spots a trend and is either ignored or heavily critised for their point of view, but ultimately proved right and met with a deafening slience.

It echoes a now infamous incident that happened in Ireland in 2007, when we were at the height of our own property boom. The then Prime Minister (or Taoiseach) Bertie Ahern, said that "that he did not know how people who engaged in moaning about the economy did not commit suicide". <http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0704/economy.html> Since then, Bertie has left his office in controversial circumstances over alleged corruption, and those who his remarks have been aimed at, such as courageous economists David McWilliams and George Lee, are held up as visionaries who warned about the dangers of excess when everyone else was gorging at the trough. As a result, the Irish taxpayer is to become the single largest owner of real estate in the WORLD, to the tune of €55bn ($75bn), because of the generous nature of the Irish Government bailout of the greedy Irish banks. This is in a country of just 4.5m people, which makes it all the more staggering. The Irish Government has bet the future of our country on the recovery of the Irish real estate market, and the youngest generation currently will end up paying for this stupidity over the next 50 years.

p.s. For all those who reckon it's morally wrong to make a fortune from a slump or crash, how is that different from making money in the good times? People are always borrowing foolishly (when the banks allow them to) and get into trouble even when the economy is doing ok. It's just these stories dont receive a mention when the media, along with everyone else, gets caught up reporting how fabulously brilliant we all are when times are good.

<comment><USER5> Not that Vanity Fair doesn't have high standards, but the author of the article(actually a chapter of his new book) was Michael Lewis, who is quite a good writer by himself. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I loved this article (i thought the personal bits were a good foundation to the entire story). Thanks for sharing it.

</comment><comment><USER7> what part did credit rating agencies like Moodys have to play in all this? They seem to have escaped from quite a lot of scrutiny in all of this...

<comment><USER8> It's pretty obvious the role they played. They're expected to be the arbiters of what the risk is. They were setting the risk value for things they had no clue about. It was simply incompetent negligence and no one should be trusting them anymore.

<comment><USER9> It's a lot worse than 'setting the risk value of things they had no clue about.' It was, flat out, a conflict of interest:

 _The AAA ratings given by the agencies proved to be wildly inaccurate and unreasonably high, according to the suit, which also said that the methods used by the rating agencies to assess these packages of securities were seriously flawed in conception and incompetently applied

The ratings agencies no longer played a passive role but would help the arrangers structure their deals so that they could rate them as highly as possible, according to the Calpers suit._

More @ [http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/07/calpers-rating- agencies...](http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/07/calpers-rating-agencies-to- blame-for-huge-losses/) (this is just but one example of Barry Ritholtz extensive coverage of this issue. McGraw Hill dropped his book b/c of his _payola_ (acurrate) line about S&P's efforts at this in particular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the best parts of this story is how crude a model can be and yet yield tremendous value. A dozen metrics on the underlying loans of the security and "most ARMs reset in two years" giving 3 years as the window for the market to fully recognize how bad the loans were.

<comment><USER11> The complicated part is all the crude models that don't do much at all that you have to trudge through to get the few worthwhile models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is too bad that there isn't a place in the medical field for people like this. I think medicine is suffering from a lack of analytical minds.

</comment><comment><USER13> The article was good, but the personal life stuff was a waste of time.

The message is clear - don't be afraid to see what others are blind to.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if I quite agree with that.

If you look at a lot of value investors / contrarians, you will see that a good number of them were exposed early on to the kinds of irrational thinking that can occur with crowds. I think these experiences make it much easier to take the approach where you go buy something that everyone else hates.

Buffett grew up when the Great Depression was still fresh in people's minds. Carl Icahn experienced prejudice for being jewish. George Soros had to hide from Nazis as a child.

<comment><USER14> Sorry for the offtopic, but jakarta, would you mind if I ask for your email? I had a few questions regarding analyst work. (My contact is in my profile). I'd appreciate your feedback if you have some time.

<comment><AUTHOR> firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Survivor bias: If I let hell loose on enough monkeys to bet on financial market before the bubble bursted, some of them would eventually "beat the wall street" and "forsee the burst" and earned themselves interviews, book deals and recognition.

The monkeys could have a chance to talked about their models then.

<comment><USER16> Did you even read the article?

<comment><USER15> I did; what's the problem with my comment?

Just to add: lots of people also bet against bubbles at any point of time of the bubble. But they were forced out of business before the bubbles could even burst( "Market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"). Only a handful survived and we thought that they have special skills or magic formula.

You underestimate the element of luck in the world of investment.

<comment> jim-greer Timing is everything, but Burry was careful to find a long-term bet with limited downside. He wasn't shorting stocks - he was buying credit-default swaps which are essentially insurance policies.

"For instance, you might pay $200,000 a year to buy a 10-year credit-default swap on $100 million in General Electric bonds. The most you could lose was $2 million: $200,000 a year for 10 years. The most you could make was $100 million, if General Electric defaulted on its debt anytime in the next 10 years"

<comment><USER15> He was successful because the bubbles burst before he went burst.

You'll never know when the bubbles will burst.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I reread the article, it is that good. However, one moment does seem extremely unusual.

How does one go from being active on investment forums to securing a few million from very experienced investors.

It is one of those one in billion occurences. I am sure Mike Burry would have done alright even without it, but still there must be more to the story.

Hopefully, full book goes into more detail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I can help fill the gap a bit.

There is an online forum for value investors called value investors club.

In order to become a member, you have to submit an investment idea which is then evaluated. If it is good enough, you get in and become a member.

The forum was started by Joel Greenblatt, of Gotham Partners. What Greenblatt does is monitor the users on the site and gauge their abilities based on ideas... if their ideas are good enough he usually contacts them to make a seed investment so that they can start a hedge fund.

Pretty much any fund connected to Gotham gets the attention of other investors and it is usually pretty easy for them to scale up afterwards. e.g.: going from 0M --> 200M in just a few years. Its sort of akin to how companies funded by YC can sometimes have it easier when attracting VC funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is he doing now? I hope he is still investing.

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I have heard, he is in the middle of a lawsuit right now with some of his investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> <http://www.worldtopinvestor.com/pub/index>

</comment><comment><USER18> A very compelling read.

<comment><USER19> I second that. It was as if I read smoothly written SF novel (by Henry Kuttner). And yet it was about real people and events.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's great that this guy has a gift but let's call what he does for what it is: exploitation. Countless pension funds and state budgets are in shambles because of people like him.

<comment><USER11> Wrong. He was simply betting that subprime loans were a huge risk that was going to go bust. If you need to blame someone, go for the people who made these loans in the first place, or the ratings companies for failing to spot the disaster.

<comment><USER21> He did more than just place a bet. He carefully read the prospectus of the individual bonds he was shorting. He looked into the underlying loans that the bond was based on. He saw: no income verification, no down payments, and inflated home prices. This is something the people buying the bonds could have and should have done themselves.</comment></comment></comment>


Dropbox Adds More Sharing Features And Search For Enterprises - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/23/dropbox-gets-down-to-business-adds-more-sharing-features-and-search-for-enterprises/

<comment><USER2> This is a step in the right direction for them, but in order for Dropbox to be the go-to provider for small businesses they're going to need to integrate better into the every day lives of people at those companies. Features like volume shadow copy and image based backup, local backup, centralized management, and reporting are common features provided by competitors targeting the small business market.

Dropbox was designed for consumers and I think the core experience lends itself well to them. They certainly have that market nailed down. But there's a reason there is a huge market they've left untouched and I don't think it's going to be easy for them to enter it without some fundamental changes to how their product operates.

Disclaimer: I work for a small online backup provider.</comment>


Parallels sell its cloud automation platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.odin.com/news/pr/release/article/sale-of-odin-service-automation-platform-to-ingram-micro/ <comment><AUTHOR> It probably had a bad time.</comment>